Hello,
As some of you may know, the EDOS project
(http://www.edos-project.org/), funded by the European Community, is
developing algorithms and tools to enhance the infrastructure of free
and open source software.
We are collecting Debian metadata daily and running installability
checks. For instance, today, 1.3% of the packages in unstable/i386 are
broken. The worst in the past 3 months has been on September 10th and
11th with 7.8% and 7.7% of packages broken in unstable. These were
particularly bad days for upgrading your packages. This data can
be browsed online at :
http://debian.edos-project.org/anla/
Therefore it seems that there are bad and betters days for upgrading your
system. Having buggy packages is one thing, getting yourself stuck
in an uninstallable mess of packages is another. Hence we recommend
checking the Debian "weather" before upgrading !
To do this, you have two solutions :
a) Web-based: Point your browser to http://debian.edos-project.org/anla/
For extra coolness, you can include live installability icons in your
page with the following HTML code :
An example can be seen at http://gallium.inria.fr/~durak/
b) Install our KDE panel applet ``kroll'' (written by Jaap Boender)
or our Gnome applet ``weather'' (written by Fabio Mancinelli).
Debian packages for i386 are available at:
http://alioth.debian.org/frs/?group_id=31055
You can also checkout their sources using SVN with
svn co svn://svn.debian.org/svn/edos
These applets will display, in your taskbar, a weather icon and a
percentage describing the installability by loading that information
from our servers.
c) Write your own applet that parses the XML output available at
http://brion.inria.fr/anla/weather?bundle=S&architecture=i386http://brion.inria.fr/anla/weather?bundle=T&architecture=i386http://brion.inria.fr/anla/weather?bundle=U&architecture=i386
where S,T and U stand for stable, testing and unstable, respecitively.
All kinds of feedback, KDE/Gnome coding and packaging help are very
welcome.
Credits go to the WP2 team of the EDOS project, more specifically to
Jaap Boender, Fabio Mancinelli, Jérôme Vouillon and myself.
--
Berke Durak, for the WP2 team.